Fixed some checkstyle issues (using final wherever possible, hence a few changes...)
Introduced constants and rename final static method in upper case (was inconsistent).
Also there were a few inconsistencies in the use of { on the same line as for or if.
Re-ordered private/static/final keywords to follow java standard (e.g. private static final...)
I hope this is ok.

* Added some serial ids to serializable classes.
* added utility methods to go from [relative, absolute, url] to [relative, absolute, url]
* deprecated a few files
* Bug 1: added test suite to make sure they work as intended. need to test in the field, but behaviour is now easy to track.